Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,105

show up as extra components.’

‘Will it matter that the scotch is diluted?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘The gas chromatograph just shows up the presence of things, not their quantity.’

He seemed relieved. ‘Turn right at the next traffic lights.

Could the gas chromatograph tell where any particular sample of tap water came from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Amazing.’

‘What is?’

‘There’s something you don’t know.’

‘Yeah… Well, I don’t know the dynasties of China or how to say no thanks in fifteen languages or the way to this bottling plant.’ And I’d like to turn straight round and go home, I thought. The nearer we got to Naylor’s the more my nervousness increased… and I thought of my father, brave as brave, setting off into battlefields, inspiring his men… and why couldn’t I be like him instead of feeling my mouth go dry and my breath shorten before we were even in the heartland of deepest Ealing.

‘Turn left here,’ Gerard said. ‘Then the third on the right. That’s our road.’

He was totally calm. No strain or anxiety in voice or face. I consciously unclenched my fingers from their grip on the steering wheel and tried without noticeable success to relax to Gerard’s level.

Hopeless. Even my teeth were tightly together when we turned into the third on the right and went slowly along.

‘There it is,’ Gerard said matter of factly. ‘See?’

I glanced to where he indicated and saw a pair of very tall entrance gates, shut, set in a length of very tall brick wall. On the gates in faded white lettering were the words ‘Bernard Nay tor Bottling’, with below them a padlock the size of a saucer.

We wouldn’t be able to get in, I thought. Thank goodness for that.

‘Turn left at the end,’ Gerard said. ‘Park there if you can.’

It was one of those suburbs built before zoning where light industries sat among dwelling houses as an integral part of the community. When I’d parked the Mercedes at a kerbside among a row of residents’ wheels we walked past lace curtains and shrubby front gardens to get back to the high wall. Eating their roast beef, I thought, and the Yorkshire puddings and the gravy… ten minutes past lunchtime and my stomach fluttering with enough butterflies to stock a Brazilian rain forest.

We walked slowly as if out for a stroll and in the short street there was only one other pedestrian, an elderly man waiting patiently for his dog at lampposts.

When we reached the gates, eight feet high, dark green sun-faded paint, Gerard stopped and faced them, head back as if reading the big white letters spreading across.

‘There’s broken glass embedded in the top of those walls,’ I said. ‘Barbed wire along the top of the gates. Don’t tell me you can pick that half-ton padlock.’

‘No need,’ Gerard said placidly. ‘Open your eyes. In many massive gates conspicuously bolted there’s a smaller door inset, wide enough for one person only. There’s one right ahead of us in the left hand gate with quite an ordinary looking spring lock, and if I can’t let us in through there I’ve been wasting the best years of my life.’

He stopped his apparent reading of the legend on the gates and resumed his stroll, glancing as if casually at the small gate cut in the large.

‘Do you smoke?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said in surprise.

‘Tie a shoelace.’

‘Sure,’ I said, understanding, and bent down obligingly to pretend to tie bows on my laceless slip-ons.

‘A doddle,’ Gerard said, above my head.

‘What?’

‘Step in.’

I saw to my astonishment that the narrow door was already swinging open. He’d been so fast. He was tucking a piece of clear plastic into his top pocket and glancing down to where the dog was again detaining his master.

Gerard stepped through the gate as if belonging there and with a rapid acceleration of heartbeats I went after him. He pushed the gate shut behind me and the spring lock fell into place with a click. He smiled faintly, and I saw with incredulity that beneath the tiredness and the malaise he was quietly enjoying himself.

‘There may be people in here,’ I said.

‘If there are… we found the gate open. Curiosity.’

We both looked at the insides of the very large gates. The padlock outside had been at least partly for show: on the inside there were thick bolts into the ground and a bar let into sockets waist high so that no amount of direct pressure from outside could force the gates open.

‘Factories often cut that hole in their defences,’ Gerard said, waving at